2011-09-21

posted by
coyote

Autumn overtakes us coyotes with all the wit and subtlety of a drunken buncha city cowboys shooting varmints from the box of a careening half-ton. So, it seems, do the ripening fruits of the Cons' comfortable federal majority.

In the flush of their win (A flush that'll rattle through Canada's sclerotic political plumbing until something inevitably breaks... I digress), they've wasted no time ticking off citizens who didn't vote for 'em and items on their long-deferred bucket list: dusting and re-hanging old queen portraits at Foreign Affairs (Minister John Baird is apparently a fan of queens. We have no information if he's a fan of foreign affairs. The evidence is murky. And I've just digressed a second time in one paragraph.) Pushing an overreaching bill to throw money the country doesn't have at crime that doesn't exist. Hiring $90,000-a-day consultants to tell them how to save money. (Now they admit they don't actually know how...?) And oh, hey, doing their level best to rehabilitate John Diefenbaker.

F'rinstance by renaming icebreakers and public buildings, most lately Ottawa's old city hall, now a satellite office of Foreign Affairs, which for decades has lived up the block in the blasphemously-named Pearson building. For the kids who haven't blown us off for Twitter yet, Pearson was a Nobel Peace Prize winner and a diplomat as well as a liberal PM. Diefenbaker's diplomatic coups seem to have been confined to alternately boring and pissing off John F. Kennedy.

Yet vast mittsful of latter day ReformaTories have declared John Diefenbaker their personal hero. I suspect because they were in utero or in diapers in his heyday, so have no personal experience of the jowly old coot. They do not recall why his own embarrassed party belatedly kidney-punched him, kicking and screaming, into extended care.

Certain six-thousand-year-old coyotes were around. And we can tell you. He was a mean-spirited partisan, a quivering, glittering-eyed paranoid whose idea of a really great joke was to verbally acid-wash non-conservatives. His grip on reality was sweaty and tenuous. Many of his policies were logical looneytunes. Long after his best-by, he soldiered on in Parliament, resurrecting petty gripes best left in history's dustbin and hallucinating happier endings for himself.